It has been a pleasure to watch John build TestSwarm and see its alpha release today. It is an ambitious project to help developers get real world testing across browsers. Here you can see it all at work:

John talks about some of the fun challenges:

TestSwarm ended up being a very challenging project to get to an alpha state (and probably will be even more challenging to get to a final release state). Dealing with cross-browser incompatibilities, cross-domain test suite execution, and asynchronous, distributed, client execution has been more than enough to make for a surprisingly difficult project. It’s mostly written in PHP and uses MySQL as a back end (allowing it to run in virtually any environment). Patches will absolutely be appreciated.

And, has a detailed look at the project. This is early days (hence alpha) yet beyond stabilization, John has the vision for some cool features:

• A pastebin-like service where you can drop in code and see the results come back, from many browsers, in real-time.
• IDE integration for sending minor changes out for quick testing.
• Manual testing of user interface code. Pushing manual tests, with instructions, to users for them to walk through.
• Distributing tests to any number of browsers, rather than a specific sub-set. (You could use this to embed a tiny iframe in your site to collect test results from a small sampling of our users.)
• The ability to drive and test browser code or extensions.

What would you like to see?

More resources

• Test Swarm Source Code
• Test Swarm Bug Tracker
• Test Swarm Discussion Group
• Test Swarm Twitter Updates